Thursday, June 14, 2012

Joy: Why the long face - Pastor Chris Reinhard

"Martin luther once went through a very dark period of depression. For days he came to dinner with a long face and it effected a dark mood in the household. One evening Luther's wife came to the dinner table dressed in black as if she were attending someone's funeral. Luther asker her, "Who died?" "Martin", she said, "the way you have been behaving lately, I thought God had died, so I came prepared to attend His funeral.""*

C. S. Lewis called joy an “unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction.” He labels it “joy” and says that it “must be sharply distinguished both from happiness and from pleasure” (Lewis, 17-18). Lewis found joy because he found God as its source.**

Joy is not some contrived feeling that we conjure up to make ourselves feel better. In short Joy comes from knowing that God's not dead. I get in a funk sometimes, it is easy to feel like the weight of the world is on our shoulders. It is easy to feel like everything is going wrong. There are a number of things that can steal our joy, or probably more appropriately, cause us to give up our joy.

When that happens with me, normally, something jolts me back to the reality that God is not dead, and God is in control. This does not mean everything is always going to go as you planned it, in fact it may never go as you planned it, but God is there with you to walk the journey. You are never alone, you are never forsaken.